A toilet leak can very quickly get out of hand if it isn’t taken care of. You’ll be facing pools of water that can damage the bathroom floor and even seep through to damage the ceiling of the room below. Then you’ll have to add the costs of those repairs to the cost of repairing the toilet – and the cost of all the wasted water on top of all that! Fortunately, as long as you’ve got the right tools a fair amount of patience, you can save yourself the money you’d otherwise spend hiring a plumber to fix a toilet leak. It may be an easier and cheaper fix than you expected, so it’s worth taking a look before picking up the phone.

One of the most common causes of a toilet leak is that the wax ring that is found inside the toilet near its bottom gets worn out. If this is the case, then the fix is a relatively easy and inexpensive one, it just takes a little bit of effort since you need to unmount the entire toilet in order to get to it.

As with any other toilet repair, the first thing that you’ll want to do is shut off the water flow to the toilet. Usually, there’s a valve right behind the toilet that does this. After you’ve turned the valve, flush the toilet a few times to drain as much water as you can. No extra water should flow into the bowl – if it does then you need to turn the valve tighter. After draining the bowl, soak up the remaining water with a sponge.

Once that’s done, then next step is to prepare to unmount the toilet to get at the source of the toilet leak. You will find some nuts on the base of the toilet that are used to hold it in place. Simply use a wrench to remove them – you may need to remove their plastic coverings with a wedge first.

Those nuts are actually all that holds the toilet in place, so now you can simply lift the toilet away carefully. Once that’s done, you should see the opening in the floor where the toilet’s plumbing begins. Find some way to plug up the hole to ensure nothing comes back at you, and then you’re ready to solve your toilet leak problem.

If the wax ring is in fact the problem, the wear and degradation should be obvious. Use a wedge to pry off what remains of the old ring both from the base of the toilet and from the pipes. There should be space for you to insert the wax ring into the base of the toilet. Once that step is completed, all you have to do is carefully line up the toilet with its plumbing and the bolts in the floor. Once you’ve remounted the toilet and secured the bolts, you’re done.

No more toilet leak!

Photo Credits: pboothe

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Categories:

Fix, Handy Man, Toilet

Tags:

bathroom floor, little bit, money, nuts, patience, plastic coverings, plumber, plumbing, pools of water, right tools, sponge, toilet leak, toilet repair, water flow, wax ring